Does anybody have any opinion (or data) or which format delivers the best quality? They seem to be interchangeable so I am trying to decide which template to use to encode my DV and HDV footage to play back on a Mac.
.mov and .mp4 are just containers, not formats. As such, there are no intrinsic quality differences.
The two are essentially interchangeable. You can name .mp4 to .mov and vice versa.
They both support several encoded formats.
Generally, .mov is a generic Apple extension for Quicktime. But there are no hard and fast rules.
And .mp4 is broadly recognized across platforms. Increasingly, .mp4 is associated with the AVC h.264 format, but it doesn't have to be.
EDIT: I discovered quite by accident that an AVC .mp4 rendered in Vegas plays in the QT player, but renaming to .mov it throws an error. The renamed file plays fine in VLC, so it may be a player limitation.
Containers and codecs are two different things. A container is like a glass jar, it just holds whatever you put in it. An AVI file is just a container, you can put audio and video into it which has been compressed with one of any number of different codecs. To take the glass jar analogy a step further, much like a label on a jar, an AVI file has a field in its header (the "FourCC" code) that tells Windows what codec was used to compress the data inside, Windows then will use that codec to decompress the video (assuming that the correct codec is installed on the machine.) The same thing applies to an MOV file, it's simply Apple's version of an AVI file.
A curious piece of trivia about AVI files; it was developed by a Microsoft engineer named, "Avi Cohen."
It's more than probably, neither of your statements are correct. May I suggest a trip over to Wikipedia to look some of this stuff up.
AVI files can be uncompressed, but they can also be highly compressed depending on what codec was used to encode the video that contained in the AVI file.
MOV files are Apple's version of an AVI file, they, too, can hold uncompressed video or compressed video.
By the way, MPEG2 is an encoding method, not a container.